RohanHarris.net

When I began to discuss getting an iPad some months ago, I found that people responded to this in one of two ways. They either said, ‘Ooooh!’ and got excited, or said, ‘Why?’ and genuinely could not understand why anyone would want such a device. (I’ve literally only heard those two reactions – never indifference – although the ‘Ooooh’ was often modified to ‘Aaaaah’ and the ‘Why?’ was often shortened to ‘Ugh’)

I think there’s really a few reasons for each reaction. The three kinds of ‘Oooooh!’ reactions are:

1. From the “Steve Jobs Is My God” zealots. They react this way to everything, and not even they know why. Maybe they have some kind of virus.
2. From gadget nuts who just like The New Shiny.
3. From people who are genuinely fascinated by its potential. Sometimes, people fit both this category and the gadget nut category.

Then you’ve got the “Why?” reactions. These seem to be for two reasons.

1. The Apple-haters. (Arbitrarily hating something because you dislike the marketing or dislike it because it’s popular is bloody stupid. Trust me. I was like that for way too damn long. The moment something became popular, I switched to an even more obscure brand or operating system – from Windows to Fedora to Slackware to FreeBSD to Linux From Scratch, etc)
2. A genuine inability to imagine how the device might be useful.

It’s the latter I want to talk about. Or, more specifically, how having an iPad has actually resulted in fairly major changes to my lifestyle. (Whether it’s for better or for worse is to be analysed with the benefit of hindsight)

On the Surface (get it? hah… I crack me up…) the iPad is a strange thing. It sits awkwardly between laptops and netbooks, with either less functionality than either (from one perspective) or completely different functionality (from another).

So, it doesn’t have a keyboard, right? Well, not a hardware one. For some people, this is a show-stopper. They don’t type on virtual keyboards. They’ve never gotten used to their iPhone or HTC’s software keyboard, never figure out the most efficient way to use the auto-correction features, and they can’t imagine not using a real / physical one. So therefore the device must be useless, right?

The iPad isn’t, without accessories, really designed to be a content creation tool. The lack of camera and keyboard make that abundantly clear. It’s a tool for consuming.

To illustrate this, I’m going to give you an example of two typical days – one without the iPad, and one several weeks after getting one.

Pre-iPad

(Please enjoy the ironic picture, courtesy of Google Images)

I wake up. I may or may not be feeling the effects of the red wine from the previous night. I glare menacingly at my phone, which is currently telling me in a shrill, insolent voice that it’s time to wake up. After the glaring fails to stop the horrible noise, I reach over and turn it off (or hit snooze one or more times to irritate my girlfriend).

After a while, I get out of bed, put on a dressing gown and collapse at my desk. I then spend a good half hour to half a day reading home email, work email, chat on gtalk, facebook, twitter, my RSS feed aggregator and the occasional news site that I feel like browsing. After these last few things are done, enough time has passed that I find myself refreshing facebook, twitter and even the odd news site again.

All this done, I make breakfast (and eat it at my desk while checking my email, facebook, gtalk messages, twitter feed or RSS feed aggregator), shower and take my place once more at my desk to write or code whatever it is I’m doing that day, occasionally stopping to either read my work email, home email, gtalk, facebook, twitter or check my RSS feed aggregator.

It’s possible that, if I have no reason to leave the house that day, I will punctuate the work process with a trip to a cafe for an espresso, continuing to work from my laptop – or perhaps read a book instead. This is, of course, important if you’re trying to maintain and air of pretentiousness about your lifestyle – but mostly it’s just so that my chair doesn’t start developing a Rohan’s-arse shaped indention in it faster than it needs to.

Once my girlfriend gets home, assuming I have no plans for the evening, I will cook dinner while listening to a film’s audio commentary or perhaps a podcast, and then watch a film or a few episodes of something with her while drinking wine.

And that’s really the bulk of my day.

Post-iPad

(Please enjoy this second ironic image, implying that the iPad is the future and that we will all become one with the internet. I don’t know who made it, but it’s cool to see a new take on the poster for The Informers)

I wake up in my bed. I may or may not be feeling the effects of the red wine I had the previous night. I glower at my phone, which is presently informing me that it’s time to cart my sorry arse out of the land where I’m an astronaut, and into the land where I’m a filmmaker who doesn’t get paid for it and software developer who doesn’t get paid enough for it.

I switch off my alarm and reach over to my iPad, which has been sitting there quietly all night, the atoms of its aluminium shell slowly ceasing their movement until the device is horribly bloody cold. (yes, this is a criticism right now – once we’re in summer I suspect I’ll feel differently)

I flick the orientation lock switch so that I can read it while lying down, and open up my email. Then I open up my twitter feed. Then my facebook page. Then my RSS aggregator, and slowly read through the day’s news articles.

Sometimes, I watch whatever new youtube videos have appeared on my subscription list (if my girlfriend has already gotten out of bed).

Once this is done (a process which usually allows my cells to age about 20 minutes), I get out of bed, plop my iPad down again and go have a shower. After this, I eat breakfast, usually on the balcony if it’s particularly nice out, or at the dining table in the sun if it’s not. While doing so, my iPad sits on its a-frame in front of me, so I can read any longer articles I flagged to look at later – often by Ebert or Emerson, or perhaps more youtube videos from folks like James Randi or the Skepchicks.

Once this is all done, I put my iPad down again and get to work coding or writing on my desktop.

But something is different. All my personal things are on the iPad. I’m now comfortable reading news articles while lounging on the couch, like it was a book or a magazine. So I don’t find myself doing that on my computer. I don’t keep my email open. I don’t refresh my twitter feed like a mad man (I let my iPad do that and just glance over at it every so-often).

I am more productive. I write undisturbed. I code without hitting apple-tab to the next window full of Stuff(tm) every 45 seconds.

Every hour, I leave my office. I sit on my balcony, or lie down on the couch. This is my down-time. It’s taken me back to when I used to read print magazines such as PC Powerplay or Wired in the sun-room of a morning.

The act of mentally segregating my reading/news/relaxation/communication from my work has changed my day.

The act of being able to read my email in bed without doing more than moving my arm has meant that I wake up easier.

These are, of course, entirely personal experiences. They speak to the strange way in which my brain works, the way in which my daily process has changed (and is now changing again) the way in which I’ve found myself using this device.

I’m fucking awful at waking up unless somebody talks to me or I’m forced to read or do something mentally stimulating, so reading my email has resulted in me finding myself awake and productive earlier.

I’m also generally awful at keeping my attention on one thing for too long. That’s why I’m a software develop- OOH look! Change list for the new release of python… be right back…

… so the act of further segregating the things I do in the day into different places within my house has been hugely beneficial for me.

Now, this is not the first time this has happened to me. I used to play games on PC more than anything else. I owned no console. This meant that I would often convince myself that I would just play “one more mission” of something, and then my productivity would go out the window.

Now, I have a few consoles and rarely play games on my computer. The act of sitting down at my TV to play games is a pro-active one. I cannot casually open a game with a single mouse-click.

I am slowly finding that I read less and less on my computer, too, and so the same act of deciding to read some more blog entries, articles, follow links on twitter or get pissed off at facefuck is one I set aside for more specific parts of my day.

Further Thoughts

(In the future, we will all walk through giant hoop-corridors and check our email on our fridges. Cyber-virtual.)

Steve Jobs may be one of the most irritating guys since Steve “Ballsack” Ballmer and his 2 degree field of figurative view, but there is one concept that Jobs sticks to that I agree with more and more each day – that computers should be appliances. Devices. Things you pick up off the coffee-table that either work or don’t – like your mobile phone, your coffee machine or that cousin of yours who lives in a trailer park.

There will always be a use for the full-sized computer on my desk. For editing video. For refining sound. For creating VFX. For playing strategy games. (Yeah, they still haven’t figure out a way to make my wargames work on the 360)

There is merit to this. It’s one thing to put your netbook in front of you and squint as you try to read the tiny screen. It’s another to scroll through articles like you were reading a magazine, comfortably curled up on the couch with your device at a funny angle against a cushion.

Obviously, this isn’t going to be the case for everyone. I’ve never harped on about how the iPad was going to be ‘for everyone’. In fact my general response when given that ‘Why?’ question from earlier was to say that I saw some use for me in it , and to leave it at that. I was happy to admit that I could be proven wrong. I’m happier still, of course, to find myself proven right.

The device isn’t perfect, of course. Not even close, if you’ve got imagination and some background in software design or development. But its existence – and the response by other computers to create both clones and (hopefully) true competitors is, I believe, a Good Thing.

Whether you’re an internet user with no interest in the technical side of things, or somebody like me who secretly reminisces about the days when you were the only one on your block who owned (or really knew how to use) a computer – the success of internet devices like these are, I feel, a truly fantastic development.

Just look at it this way: how cool would it be if your family stopped calling you for technical support because they were simply picking up a thing off their coffee-table to check their joint email account each morning?

That’s where we’re going. And it won’t be a bad thing at all for us tinkerers and hobbyists who recompile kernels for fun.

Note 1: Despite my comment about it not being a content creation device, when paired with a blue-tooth keyboard I found during my recent four-day trip to Brisbane that people break for pedestrians more there than in Sydney. Also, that the iPad easily becomes a very usable tool for writing long emails, blog entries and even screenplays – whether or not you’re used to a virtual keyboard. It won’t truly come into its own until Google Docs works natively on it, though. Cloud computing, a tablet and a park by Sydney Harbour is the future for my writing, that’s for sure.

Note 2: I have also found the iPad to be a unique gaming device. Not ‘great’ or ‘crap’ yet – just underused, but with glimmers of genius. Much like its other uses, it doesn’t quite overlap with other things, and is a strangely social thing to play on. I will write a separate article about this over at Restore, Restart, Quit. If you’re interested, watch that space in the coming weeks.